Tag Archive for 'servers'

Nov3rd2009

Thermal Failure Protection

When you have a server (and lets hope it is a real one and not a Zhong Guan Cun job) you should enable thermal protection. Because A/C units do fail as do fans and other servers. Thermal protection will cause your systems to shut down gracefully and prevent damage to them and surround devices – like UPS batteries.

May15th2008

Nickel and Dimming Vendor Olympics?

In the middle of putting out a proposal for a very large client/tender at the moment. Well over a life time’s earnings in servers and an as yet un calculated retainer and service rate at this stage – electricity and bandwidth and human hours all cost money. I always try to get the best prices [...]

Jan18th2008

Software as a Service, ASPing, ESPing, ISPing and many more “SP’s”

Software as a service. Sounds nice doesn’t it? How about utility computing or computing as a service? Well it is not until you actually start to UNDERSTAND it – that you get to appreciate it. All too often the pundits of tech in society (as nice as they are), like twit.tv, cnet.com and zdnet.com – [...]

Jan9th2008

China an inefficient truth

I read this entry over on David Wolf’s blog before my recent trip back down under about power usage and IT infrastructure. Silicon Hutong And the topic did strike a “Hey this is real man!!!” kind of chord with me. A cathartic resonance that shall never come from me with respect to the greater greenhouse [...]

Dec3rd2007

PostgreSQL Re-Index, Index Corruption

Ever had a situation like this: Select from database ID where name = RICHARD; Returns and ID of 55 for example. Then go and do a query like this: Select * from some_other_table where ID = 55; Returns, “Sorry does not exist, time to die…..” Well apparently indexes when corrupt – which is NOT SUPPOSED [...]

Nov18th2007

Drive Roaming. DELL PERC4 Controllers

During a recent test run to see if a new PostgreSQL back end server would hasten things up in a main cluster – that has now become CPU bound and NOT IO…… the wizardry of that I will blog about later. In any case, the short of it is, that we were juggling PERC4 cards [...]

Nov17th2007

DRAC4 Reset?

My hosting manager found out this cool info recently. DRAC cards are a pain when they do not work – which is not rare. They are very important and are only needed in rare circumstances. However if those circumstances arise – these cards MUST perform. I must say that the PE1800 and DRAC4 that we [...]

Nov5th2007

gam_server ruining your IO throughput? Context switches hitting 8,000 a second?

This hit me today. The “gam_server” process. Set to identify when any file in the system is changed. A useful action that has benefits. But not when it does it 3-5 times per second and the sever is serving NFS and PostgreSQL! To fix it, just ensure that somewhere in /etc/ (RedHat Base) or /etc/gamin/ [...]

Nov5th2007

The New Virtual Infrastructure

I have been using VMWARE/BOCHS and UML for around 7 years now. And boy have things moved quickly! Most recently VMWARE announced their new products. ESX 3.5 is basically the same as ESX3, the main new feature that all people could use is the central patch management system. The feature that is really putting this [...]

Nov3rd2007

ICP Certificates, Beijing Linux User Group Compliance

Well, the thing is, in China, you have to have a licence to have a website, called an ICP. It costs money if you are commercial, even more money if an e-commerce site, as well as a bank deposit with a certain amount of registered capital. For non commercial entities it is free and no [...]

Oct7th2007

When 73GB is not 73GB! Enter LVM

Thought I should write something tech for a change! It is golden week here and all are away on break. So instead of forcing a staff member to come back, I thought I would take care of some stuff myself. My problems started when a client who has a large advertising cluster, was running their [...]